Activus Ltd. was moving to a new larger office and so the server room needed to be decommissioned then moved and reconnected at the new office location.

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A lot of the preliminary work had been done already at the new office. The previous tenants had built a server room in the basement so it was fully equipped with racks, air conditioning and a networked patch panel for around 250 network ports.

In addition we had a staggered transition to the new office whereby I had set it up as a branch office for a dozen staff about a month before the final move. So all the services such as power, telephone and internet connectivity were in place leaving me now to concentrate on planning and implementing the physical migration of the servers, switches and UPS.

I planned the final move to happen on Saturday May 25th 2013 and led a team of five staff including myself to move the hardware from the old office to the new. The previous evening I had made backups of all the critical virtual machines and databases to be stored off-site. So if the worse were to happen I'd be able to restore some semblance of the system. Fortunately nearly everything went smoothly and all the infrastructure made it to the new office intact and all worked when installed in the new racks, connected up and switched on.

There was just one mishap during the whole exercise, this was the dropping of a UPS as myself and a colleague were removing it from the old rack. Even with all the batteries removed the UPS weigh a ton and it slipped out of our grasp. No damage to the UPS but I am now permanently scarred with a gash to my leg from one of the edges as it fell.

One obstacle was the location of the new server room. Down a narrow set of steps from the office car park into the basement. Also the server room itself is very narrow making the manoeuvring of the equipment into the racks quite difficult.